Justice completely failed to be done, so to speak, by the stories. The creature was somehow larger than the space containing it, a conflagration of feathers and scales and teeth and color, with two slitted eyes right in the center. It was hard to focus on the thing, because one’s gaze kept shifting away to follow some new flash of movement, the way that a drunk can’t help but stare at the siren screen in a bar. There was no pattern to the thing, but the mind kept trying to make one, attempting to forge the chaos into meaning. It did give the vague impression of a snake, but that was probably only in the way that it folded and undulated. It was ultimately more like watching a quick-motion video of a fault tremor, or watching plate tectonics happen on a compressed scale. It was like a hundred chickens had been dyed competing colors and dropped in a bouncy castle. It was like a birthday party as drawn by an alien who had only heard one described. It was like everything, all at once, but also like nothing, in that there was nothing like it and in that there was nothing comprehensible going on, nothing to learn, no way to grasp it because there was nothing to grasp. It was obvious why none of the depictions matched another, because there was no way to depict this in fewer than seven dimensions, two of them imaginary. Quetzalcoatl was beyond description, or understanding, beyond knowing, beyond seeing. Simply beyond all.

Harry, the Wingman to the Gods, said, “This is going to be complicated,” and finished his drink.